Men Will Be Boys: The Modern Woman Explains Football and Other Amusing Male Rituals [Hardcover]

Sally Jenkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1996

Acclaimed writer Sally Jenkins travels from locker rooms to team laundry rooms and kicks open the door to reveal what men may have feared for some time--women are pigs, too. Women love the mess, the game plan, and the pileup in the end zone as much as the next guy; they just wonder if a winning season means that the head coach isn't able to spend enough time with his kids.



Every Sunday and Monday from September to January, 40 million women tune in to watch NFL football. Sally Jenkins knows that the average woman knows as much about football as the men in her life. With such helpful devices as "A Babe's Glossary of Football terms" and "Stupid Female Questions that Make Perfect Sense," Men Will Be Boys reveals that for every fumble that has the modern woman screaming at the television set, she's also pondering...



How come the big guy in the front line makes so much less than the smaller guy behind him who is always so clean?



Why do coaches wear those beltless pants?



In Men Will Be Boys Jenkins punctures the macho crap that surrounds the game and makes it more fun for the woman fan. And men, too, if they'd only admit they don't know everything.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Sports Illustrated staff writer Sally Jenkins has produced a clever, very funny guidebook for women on how to appreciate, or at least tolerate, men's fascination with big-time sports. Jenkins' transcript of the first all-women broadcast of Monday Night Football, in 2006, is worth the price of the book in itself. Jenkins also climbs to the podium to share her views on female sportswriters and sportscasters, but it's the funny stuff here that will capture the attention of readers--and maybe save a few marriages.

From Publishers Weekly

Dedicated to both her father, who "Frankensteined" her, and her long-suffering mother, this is a sometimes hilarious, sometimes soapboxy handbook on women and football, women and other sports, and women and men by a former staff writer for Sports Illustrated. After uproarious chapters on women as gridiron experts who have a different take on the game, the book climaxes in a chapter sure to appear in humor anthologies, a transcript of the first all-female broadcast of a Monday Night Football game in 2006, followed by a transcript of the first nationally televised NFL Women's League football game in 2022. There is an ironic chapter on the comforting clarity in the narrative of a football game: the game has a beginning, a middle and an end, plus a final score. But when Jenkins discusses female sportswriters and especially female sportscasters, she seems to forget that she is writing a book of humor and becomes preachy (on women in lockerrooms: "women do not eroticize the workplace. But try explaining that to the sports-minded man").
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 225 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1 edition (September 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385482183
• ISBN-13: 978-0385482189
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,558,245 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sally Jenkins is an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post and is the co-author of the best selling It's Not About the Bike and Every Second Counts, written with Lance Armstrong. She lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brave, politically incorrect view of women & sports, March 20, 2000

By 

Barbara Marshall (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Men Will Be Boys (Paperback)

Sally Jenkins is 100% correct. In her gutsy and humorousdepiction of women and their view of sports, Jenkins reminds us thatthere is a wonderful difference between the sexes and that this in no way means that one is inferior to the other.

I have worked in a male-dominated industry for 17 years. I succeed in a male-dominated sport. I support women's atheletics. I love men. All these things can coexist peacefully. Jenkins is brave enough to point this out.

Parents of daughters in love with jocks and parents of male atheletes should read and give their children this book. Jenkins makes a solemn point that while the NFL sanctions it's players for drug abuse, they turn a blind eye to spousal abuse and rape. The NFL is more prone to fine a player for staying at his wife's side while she is in labor than they are to bench a player for gang rape. Every parent should consider the consequences of this "sense of entitlement from years of being let off the hook".

I think this is the original "Mars and Venus" book. It's fun to read Joe Gibbs' and Boomer Esiason's take on gender differences. You owe it to yourself as a parent, athelete, or fan of any sport to read Sally Jenkins "Men Will Be Boys".

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected, January 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Men Will Be Boys (Paperback)

This was a strange book and not at all what I expected after seeing the reviews. It tries to be a funny book, yet there are also some very serious issues discussed and the combination doesn't make for enjoyable reading -- only confusion. As a die--hard female NFL fan, it didn't represent my views of why I watch or enjoy the game at all. When I finished the book, I was left thinking, "What was the point?"